Interruptions and holidays …

You start blogging again in earnest hoping to post at least every other day and what happens? You have a long weekend which lasts for like five days, that’s what happens :p Honestly, Sri Lanka is probably the country with the most holidays in the world! This time, the holidays went on from Friday the 30th of April to the middle of this week – Wednesday to be exact. When I got back to work on Thursday of course, I was flooded with stuff to do after such a long break. What else is new? :p
Of course, I had been planning to do a lot of stuff over the holidays but as usually happens with the plans of mice and men, I never actually got around to doing most of it – especially my coding :p Did manage to catch a few of the movies which have been lying around waiting for me to watch them though. Actually, that was mostly due to the fact that we’d recently gotten a new stack of movies and wanted to get through the lot before I totally forgot about them 🙂 So what’d I watch? Actually, I forget most of them now though I do recall that there were a few Hindi movies in there. Did watch the Kevin Costner starrer "Open Range" but found it to be a bit tedious. The story was OK I guess but seemed to plod on a bit at times and Costner’s propensity to have wide panoramic shots at times gets to be a bit too much :p

I also watched Tarantino’s "Kill Bill Volume I" in anticipation of getting my hands on a good DVD copy of volume II soon. Now if you are the squeamish type and don’t like to see blood spurting out all over the place like a hundred fire hydrants that had their tops knocked off, then you really shouldn’t be watching this movie. I normally don’t like movies with a lot of violence but then again, that is usually when the story is dark and moody and the violence is somehow "real". Here, the violence is so over the top that it seems comical or cartoonish and I just enjoyed the show to its fullest 🙂 I loved the improbable fight scenes and the way over the top storyline and am looking forward to watching the second volume whenever a good DVD copy comes out – the movie is too good for me to go out and grab one of those crappy camera copies, thank you very much :p

My Favourite Waste of Time …

Actually, what my favourite waste of time is, is a question since there are so many :p As I mentioned in the previous post, of late, the problem has been finding the time to do anything because I seem to have accumulated a lot of ways to waste time 🙂 And the funny thing is, that in the beginning I actually seemed to have the time for all of this but suddenly I find that I have so many things to do and not enough time to do it all in. I blame the Internet :p

You think that’s an exaggeration? Not at all. Just take a look at the list of my most recent wastes of time and you’ll see why I blame the Net. First there are the TV shows. I had a few shows that I loved when I was in the US but once I got back to Sri Lanka, I ever gave up hope of seeing those shows. Then came one fine day when I realized that all these shows are available on the Net for download and all I had to do was get them off the Net and I could keep up with the shows almost as soon as they were aired in the US! So now I’m busily watching 24, Gilmore Girls, Monk, Smallville and Star Gate whenever there is a new show and that keeps me busy through the week 🙂 Actually, in the case of Gilmore Girls, we actually get the fourth season (which is on air in the US as well) here in Sri Lankan television but they are a bit behind in Sri Lanka and so I prefer to get my show from online and then watch it again when it goes on TV :p

Then there were the comics. Again, something I’d had access to in abundance when I was in the US. Here, it’s hard to get your hands on comics. Then I discover that that too is available online for download :p Not only that, but I discovered that I could get hard to find collections like Marvel’s "Infinity War" or the "Infinity Gauntlet" or any of DC’s Elseworld’s titles, fairly easily online. The only problem? They seem to be either archives of JPG collections or files in the comic book reader format (CBZ or CBR), which are just renamed ZIP or RAR files. I simply hate having to go through JPG collections and reading it file by file – yeah, nothing to get so upset about but call me finicky :p So, what I do is extract all the JPG files from their archives and then use Adobe Professional to combine them all in one PDF file which I name a specific way and then add to my collection. Yes, I’m anal and I create most of my own work :p

The latest waste of time came about of course when I discovered that I could get old DOS games from the Net and better yet, get their Amiga versions which look better and even play better as long as you can configure the Amiga emulator correctly. So now, I sit at home on an evening playing Lemmings when I don’t have a comic to go through or a TV show to watch 🙂

And those are just the latest of my wastes of time 🙂 There are the existing ones like watching movies – I just bought 13 DVD’s last Saturday since the pirate DVD trade is booming in Sri Lanka and you can buy the latest Hollywood releases for something like US$ 3 :p And guess how many of those 13 movies I’ve seen so far? One! Yeah, there just is too little time in the world :p

Rants and writings …

Yes, it’s been quite a while :p I’ve switched hosts, moved servers and at the same time been so swamped by real-life events that I haven’t had much time to write here or to do much maintenance except for the bare minimum on the site. I might not have written this entry either except for the fact that I’d just gotten up in irritation after reading what caused this entry to emerge and then sat down at the computer to do something else. But be that as it may, here is my rant :p

I’ve been reading Robert Ludlum for close to twenty years now and I’ve always enjoyed his work. I started with "The Bourne Identity" and was almost immediately hooked and have since then read all of his books in print (except for the last few in his collaborative "Covert One" series …) and have almost all of them in my collection. I just started reading his latest – "The Janson Directive" and I must say that the prologue left me less than impresed .. in fact, in full rant mode :p This probably is due to the fact that Ludlum struck pretty close to home in many fronts but still, I just am not amused by the tack he’s taken. The opening is about a terrorist attack in a fictitious island in the Indian Ocean close to Sri Lanka. However, what irks me is that he’s modeled this island after Sri Lanka but has made certain changes which irk me. In Sri Lanka, there is an ongoing ethnic conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese but what does Ludlum do but put the conflict in his story between Hindus and Muslims and of course, the Muslims are the terrorists .. is that because "everybody" knows that Muslims are terrorists or is that because that would sell more books? I don’t know …

Then of course, Ludlum decides to move Adam’s Peak which is in Sri Lanka, to his fictitious island and call it Adam’s Hill but with the same kind of history and here of course, he mentions Tamils and Buddhists as being part of the island’s population – though they never get mentioned anywhere else in the prologue. Then there is the whole matter of this bogus island’s history – it had been ruled by the Dutch (not the British mind you since the Brits might still object to how things go in the book – but the Dutch are safe enough to vilify I assume ..) up to fifty years ago and the Dutch governor at that time had been shot by an independence fighter. And I will not even go into the usage of the word "kurakkan" (which is actually a Sinhalese word used to describe a kind of grain grown in Sri Lanka) to mean root crops .. though I guess I just did.

I know, all of this might seem trivial things to anybody who is not from the area and who probably isn’t a Muslim but it all points to a certain type of mindset and a certain form of vilification by "established" authors. I am from Sri Lanka, I love my country and don’t want it to be used by some idiot somewhere to model his fantasy playground upon. If he wants to do it, then let him use the truth but then again, I guess that would be too much to bear … Ah well, yes, I know .. I get upset at trivialities perhaps .. but that’s just me :p

Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur

I said it wasn’t going to be an entry about love yesterday but unfortunately, I can’t promise the same today :p You see, I watched a Hindi movie yesterday after a long time and as always, it gets me thinking of love, what it means, how I look at it, where I am as far as love concerned and so on and so forth. It’s inevitable with Hindi movies since almost always they are about love or have a touch of love somewhere in them :p But on to the movie itself – it was called "Chalthe Chalthe" and that means something like "on the way" or "during the journey". I loved the movie since it was in a way different from other Hindi films which concentrate on the love story for the entire movie. Here, the love story was the first half and then the problems the lovers face after they are married and the realities of love was the focus of the second part.

Hindi movies are famous for "borrowing" from Hollywood flicks and so I have this sneaking suspicion that this might be an adaptation/localization of a Hollywood movie but if so, I didn’t recognize the original. But I did love the love story – the protagonist falls in love with a girl on the first meeting and she seems to like him too but he loses her phone number and can’t contact her. He searches high and low and finally finds her after a week or so and by that time, she’s engaged to be married to a childhood friend – it’s an arranged marriage as is common in South Asia. Of course, the girl has been brought up in Greece and her family is in Greece (though the story starts in India since the girl has returned to India for something or other ..) and now she has to go back to Greece. The guy tries to tell her that he loves her but she says that they’ve known each other for such a short time and that he’ll forget her eventually and leaves.

The guy decides that he must follow her since otherwise he’d spend his whole life wondering what would have happened if he’d tried to stop her. He gets on the same plane as the girl and the flight gets rerouted somewhere due to bad weather in Athens – which is where they both are going. They spend time together while waiting for the flight to Athens and this was the bit I found interesting – the guy does several things (like jumping into a wishing well to retrieve a coin that the girl had thrown in) just because he realizes that she wants it and of course, as I might have mentioned before, to me that is what love means – doing what the person you love wants, even if that might not be what *you* want. In the end, he drives her to Athens since she is desperate to get home, even though he knows that doing so will only part her from him sooner. Of course, this being a Hindi movie, things end happily during the first half and while they do have fights and problems as a married couple, things do end happily at the end of the movie as well since they realize once again that they love each other very much and can’t live without each other 🙂

So what has all that got to do with me? I did enjoy the movie but it also simply revived my love for love – if that makes sense 🙂 I also realized that while I might be insane in a way to look for that kind of love in today’s world (or in any day’s world perhaps .. I don’t know .. I’ve lived only one life and even that not fully <g>), that the search itself is what counts – even if I never find that kind of love because like the protagonist saying that he’d always wonder about the "what if" if he didn’t go after the girl, I too would wonder about the possibilities if I didn’t go in search of love. At least, that’s the way I feel …

The founts of wisdom …

Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" is giving me a lot to think of and also has provided some insights into myself, the world around me and the way I look at the world. It sometimes surprises me immensely to see my own philosophies reflected in somebody else’s writings and to hear something that I felt only as a gut-feeling expounded upon and explained so that I myself can come to understand the why’s and whereto’s of my own feelings and reactions. I finished reading a chapter yesterday which was a revelation, an epiphany in its own way though there was nothing new in what I read – just the way it was presented.

I’ve always been an individualist – I don’t believe in doing something a certain way just because the rest of the world does it that way. I always want a logical reason for doing something a certain way and it doesn’t matter to me that people have been doing it that way from time immemorial, if it doesn’t make sense to me, then I don’t do it that way. I don’t want to make money so that I can lord it over other people, I don’t help others so that I can feel superior to them – everything I do, I do because *I* want to. I know that a lot of people don’t like me going against the grain (including my own parents) but put that down to simple dislike of that which is unusual – out of the norm. However, Ayn Rand puts a new spin on it – she proposes (and I won’t quote her words here but rather, try to put things in my own words the way I understood it – for my own clarification) that people who lie, cheat, ruin and destroy others (all of this on the sly of course) just to be famous or to be accepted/admired by others are selfless because they put others before their own self – that years of dinning into our collective consciousness about altruism and selflessness has resulted in this. That these people are willing to put their own self through the tortures of knowing how despicable they really are just so that others will see them as kind, honourable and altruistic. She also states that a truly selfish man (or woman) cannot be affected by the admiration or approval of others because it doesn’t matter to them at all – that anything they do is purely out of their own selfish desire to please themselves. So I guess that does make me a really selfish person – and in a funny way, it makes sense too :p

But the strangest thing was that I’d been thinking about the very same thing in a different light earlier on in the day (before I read that particular chapter in the book). I was thinking about my friend Robin, he’d bought a new notebook computer and he was going around showing it to everybody and while thinking back upon that and how I probably hadn’t seemed very interested (because a notebook is a notebook – you can see how well it performs but after that I really can’t admire it like a work of art :p), I was reminded of the time I got the P800 and how he went around showing my phone to everybody when I couldn’t care less if anybody saw it or not – because I bought the phone because I wanted it .. not to show it to others or to impress others. Now don’t misunderstand me, yes, I’d show it to a few people that I really liked (if I knew that they were geeky enough to enjoy it :p) but I really don’t buy things or do things to show it off to other people – only because *I* want it. And this too ties in neatly with what Ayn Rand had to say.

Of course, I kept on thinking along the same lines and realized that this might apply to me in another sense too – I mean relationship-wise. All of my relationships so far have not really worked for me (and no, I’m not going to launch into another one of my rambles about how I perceive love and how I don’t think that love the way I think of it might not exist .. so keep on reading <vbg>) and I suddenly realized that this too might have something to do with the same philosophy that Ayn Rand describes. Would I find happiness with somebody who wants the approval of the world or at least, can’t stand upon her own mental feet as far as what she wants is concerned? Because I would always be the kind of person who was frowned upon by society and if my partner wanted the approbation of those around us, she’d never find it and neither she nor I would truly be happy in such a relationship. And if she wanted just to please me, I’d get irritated after a while because I’d want to know what she really wanted and not see a reflection of what I wanted in her. Again, I’ve dimly known this and have always looked for somebody who was like me – somebody who understood themselves completely and wanted to live life first and foremost for themselves. However, I’d again understood this only instinctively – not as a reasoned thought arrived at after due consideration …

All of this actually leads to something else I mentioned a day or two ago – about "who writes the script" and whether life is actually a series of concerted scenes in a drama where you are just a player. My life has a tendency to be cyclical – certain things happen in a certain order and I see that they are happening again in exactly the same mini-sequence that they always seem to, and I’m beginning to think that maybe this insight that "The Fountainhead" has suddenly shown me might be what I need to break out of the cycle and find a new direction .. or maybe I just think too much :p

Rand’s Brand :p

I was unable to make the entry about "The Fountainhead" today in the morning as promised yesterday (mostly due to me getting so busy that I found I had no time for blogging in the morning – but more on that at my other blog <g> and so I will move on …) so here is that entry – delayed maybe by about twelve hours but still finally here :p

I’ve had Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" in my library for close to ten years now I think. I bought the book because of the blurb on the back cover which claimed that it was a great love story – or in the words of the cover itself "The Fountainhead is about ambition, power, gold and love – a love so firm that it triumphed like the hero’s massive stone towers over slander, separation, jealousy and the cruel assaults of those who sought to destroy it". Me being the utter romantic that I am, could you fault me for buying the book? :p Of course, once I did get home with it and got ready to read it, I read the blurb on the inside cover and this talked about Ayn Rand’s philosophy of "objectivism" which the book called enlightened self-interest. This seemed like such an oxymoron – it was like saying positive selfishness – that I didn’t feel like reading the book after all. So, I put the book down, then took it up again but again put it down and so on till a few weeks ago when I decided to give fantasy and SF a rest for a bit and read something new … and turned to "The Fountainhead".

The book captured my imagination with almost the first chapter – I liked the character of the protagonist – Howard Roark – immensely. Like most of the protagonists I really like, I could see bits of myself in him. In fact, in this case I went so far as to see a lot of myself in him and a little bit of myself in his opposite, Peter Keating. At the same, time, I could see the same mixture reversed in Robin – one of my closest friends 🙂 Not that that explains anything to anybody but this kind of brought home to me how real two of the very first characters you meet in the book are. Some of the other characters have captivated me just as much – probably because all of them are so complex … their motivation is not so cut-and-dried as would appear with most characters in books but instead extremely complicated and in some instances entirely hidden from the reader till later on since you don’t get a glimpse into their mind but just a front-row seat to their actions 🙂

I could probably go on and on about the book and even spoil the story for somebody who might actually want to read it … but I won’t :p Because for one thing, I haven’t finished reading it and so don’t know how I myself feel about the book as a whole but for another, I’d like you to read it if all I’ve said so far does arouses your curiosity 🙂 So go on, take a look at the book (which I realized just a little while ago had been written as far back as 1947 :p) and see what you think – if you enjoy complex characters and some fine storytelling, you might just enjoy the book …

Matrices and mindsets

Sometimes I really wonder about how things turn out – I’d thought that I’d not get to see "Matrix Reloaded" for a while yet since the only way I’d see it would be as a pirated movie and that would probably be a bad camera copy. But guess what? Not only have I seen the movie within ten days of it’s release but I saw a copy that should be just as good as what’s shown at the theaters! But enough of the strange anomalies in life (or should I say the matrix? :p) and on to the movie itself … but don’t worry, I will try not to spoil it for anybody else who might not have seen it …

The first part of the movie was a bit of a disappointment to me – yes, it had all sorts of spectacular effects, more fights than before and so on but it seemed to drag a bit at points and to get a bit too philosophical at times. The philosophy in the first movie was a bit more subtle and didn’t get so wordy – or maybe this was just the mood I was in when I watched the movie (it was late at night and I was tired after a full day) and so I’ll probably have to judge based on a second viewing in a week or so – which I fully intend to do since I do need a second viewing to get all the finer points that I might have missed.

The philosophy? Oh there is a lot more philosophy believe you me – there is talk of causality, of freedom of choice, of the importance of hope and then there are the indirect references (like how the first movie set Neo up as a Christ figure with his death and resurrection and the promise that he will bring redemption/freedom to the people) to more eastern philosophies like reincarnation, the wheel of life etc. And of course, as always there are "explanations" of reality – they even do a bit where they explain unexplained phenomena :p Of course, the second viewing that I’ve promised myself might help me to get a better handle on all the different philosophy bits as well …

There was one scene where Neo gets attacked by hundreds and hundreds of agents that left me feeling a bit of deja vu (and you know that was a glitch in the matrix :p) because it looked so incredibly like a scene from Jet Li’s "The One" (and of course, Neo is *the one* :p) but be that as may be, the final portion of the movie fully justified it being the sequel in the matrix series since it had new revelations, surprises and conundrums. I am not too happy with the way they concluded the movie since unlike the first movie (which was self-contained) they left you with a slight cliff-hanger on this one and we’ve got to wait till November to find out what happens. I hate that! Ah well .. anyway, I did have some interesting thoughts on the movie and it’s connection to reality such as the fact what if we are really living in the matrix and the Wachowski brothers are simply making a movie about what they’ve come to realize as the "real" reality subconsciously? :p Of course, I’m sure somebody else has made this suggestion already but I was kind of interested in exploring the idea but time and space prevents me – time because I’ve got at least three more movies to watch today and space because this would become a very long entry if I tried to go into all the different ideas and suppositions I might come up with :p

Of rants and reasoning …

Yesterdays non-rant about people saying something and doing something else seems to have touched a few nerves since I received several responses to that in one form or another :p But it actually was that – a non-rant. I wasn’t going to let other people’s actions upset my equilibrium and I was simply stating something that was going through my mind at that particular time – so no reason for anybody to be alarmed, offended, irritated etc :p

However, reading Gordon R. Dickson’s "Way of the Pilgrim" later on during the evening, a paragraph from the book struck me as being relevant to this particular situation. In this particular situation, the earth has been conquered by aliens and the protagonist is trying to understand the alien mindset. In the process, he says that aliens and humans see each other as distorted reflections of themselves in a mirror. He goes on to explain that what he meant was that the aliens and humans can’t really understand each other since they think in totally different ways and yet, they can’t help trying to equate the other’s actions with the way they’d do something and so come up with a distorted picture of themselves to explain the actions of the other. I’m not sure that I explained that properly here but anyway, it made sense to me and what is more, I realized that this holds true even in human-human interactions.

We don’t really understand what drives other people and so we attribute certain things to them in order to understand their actions – only thing is, that is probably a distorted picture of that person since we can never be certain of correctly identifying what drives the other person. For example, there is the case of something that happened at my grandfather’s funeral – this incidentally, is one of the reasons I hate going for any family gathering :p I had bought a new cellular phone recently and by Sri Lankan standards it’s pretty expensive since it’s a Sony Ericsson P800 and it’s one of the latest in the market. My Dad had commented on this to one of my uncles and while my parents berated me for spending so much on the phone, I wouldn’t be surprised that when they spoke to my uncle about it if they hadn’t said it with a touch of pride – hinting that I could *afford* to spend so much money on a new phone … and of course, they would have mentioned the price of the phone.

Anyway, my uncle comes up to me later and asks me if I had my phone with me and I thought that he simply wanted to take a call and told him that I was out of range since I was. He says never mind and takes me over to his son-in-law and a few others and introduces me to them. Then he casually says that my father had told him that I bought a new phone and asks me if he can see it and then says that he doesn’t know much about this stuff and passes the phone on to his son-in-law. Naturally, the price of the phone gets discussed at this point too. I thought at that point that my uncle was simply trying to impress his son-in-law and his relatives with the fact that his nephew had such a good phone (or could afford one) – they do that kind of thing here in Sri Lanka :p But when I told my parents about the incident later, they said that it wasn’t so at all – that my uncle had simply doubted the price that my Dad had quoted (which was the price that I actually paid) and wanted to make sure that my Dad wasn’t lying by getting his son-in-law and the others to verify the price because my uncle trusted his son-in-law more than anybody else (my parents’ opinion, not mine).

My point here is that I thought of my uncle’s actions in one way and my parents looked at it a different way – each one of us basing our opinion of a person (my uncle in this instance) on how we’d interacted with him, how we thought of him and our own ways of looking at things. I really have no idea who is right about the real motives of my uncle – maybe none of us are. But I’d still prefer to think of my uncle the way I’d thought of him since to me that’s a less negative picture – there is this Disney TV movie which I forget where the central character says something along the lines of "if you look for the good in people you will find it" and I’d like to believe that. Maybe I wear rose-tinted glasses but heck, it’s better than looking at everybody and wondering what they might do to you … though sometimes it’s hard not to do that too :p

Of death and Dickson …

They have a saying here in Sri Lanka that death comes in threes and the funny things is that I was thinking about this last week when the husband of my mother’s cousin passed away just two days after my grandfather passed away. And guess what? The third death in the family has appeared as well – this time it’s a relative/contemporary of my Dad’s and my parents have gone to the funeral. Since I never knew the last two people, I didn’t go to either funeral but it does make me think as to whether there just might be some truth in all these old sayings – such as "death comes in threes" …

I’m reading Gordon R. Dickson’s "Way of the Pilgrim" at the moment. I feel as if Gordon R. Dickson really understands me from the way he writes about his protagonists – some of the things he comments on are so uncannily similar to the way I am or the way I think. I’ve noticed this with several of Dickson’s later novels including the later books of the Childe cycle. I’d probably try to contact Dickson himself since I wonder if he just writes his characters this way or if he actually thought this way but unfortunately, he passed away several years ago. It still is strange though – the way his protagonist looks at the world, the way he seems so separated from the rest of humanity and even some of his philosophies and actions just seem to strike a chord within me. Ah well .. maybe I’ve just been reading too much Dickson lately :p

Speaking of people and their actions, I’m tempted to launch into a rant about why people say something and do something else or berate you for doing something and then go ahead and do the same thing themselves with not a word or hint of apology but I guess that’s just another example of the irrationality of people. So I will save my breath and go do something constructive … like code :p

Of floods and feelings …

We’ve been having heavy rains here in Sri Lanka recently and while Sri Lanka does not have snow, earthquakes, typhoon, cyclones, tidal waves or volcanoes, we do have one problem – floods. Certain areas in Sri Lanka are currently under heavy flooding and I hear that hundreds of thousands of people are left homeless. Pictures of houses totally covered by water, cats sitting on roofttops with water all around them, TV antennas sticking out of fast flowing water and buses stopped at the edge of water with no means of going forward are common sites on TV. My heart cries out for all the people affected by the floods and their families. I hope the rains stop soon and that these people are able to go back to their homes and that no more lives are lost due to the floods. But then again, we’ll probably go back to no rain and will have a whole new set of problems when the power cuts start …

The "Gilmore Girls" have always been a favourite topic of mine here :p If you’ve been following this blog, you’d remember my ranting about Rory and her relationship with Dean, how while claiming to love Dean, she also seems to be leading Jess on and hiding things from Dean. Yesterday’s episode of the "Gilmore Girls" actually showed me a new perspective on Rory’s actions and while I still don’t approve of her actions (to me, a relationship is about commitment – total and absolute. If you have a problem with the commitment, then you tell the other person and then you decide what to do next – a combined decision, not an arbitrary act by an individual …) I was able to understand why she did what she did and that insight has also helped me with the way I look at the world. In yesterday’s episode, Rory suddenly goes to New York to see Jess (he’s been sent away from Star’s Hollow where Rory lives … long story …) and on her return her mother tells her that she must face the facts – that she’s falling for Jess.

Rory vehemently denies this. She says that she loves Dean, that she is happy with Dean that she doesn’t want to hurt Dean and that she has no idea why she did what she did. I then realized that she can’t see the truth herself – that wittingly or unwittingly, she’s lying to herself. The thing is, that this is true of so many of us – we lie to ourselves when certain matters are concerned. We might say that we are totally not that kind of person about a certain way of behaviour and yet behave just the way that we said we didn’t like and yet deny to ourselves that we were doing it. This is something that I’ve never understood about other people – how they could do that and still think that they are being honest with themselves. But now I begin to ask myself whether I’m that way too? Maybe I do something which is totally against my *stated* principles and yet am justifying why I do that too by lying to myself? I hope not because I don’t like that type of behaviour in others and I’d think that other people feel the same way … All I can do is try to be true to myself and hope that I don’t fall into the same trap that Rory has fallen into …